The Infirmary

Edward Micus

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781612775500
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Poesía americana

Winner of the 2008 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize

"[Edward Micus's The Infirmary is] a rarity: a mature debut, a first book of poems with time-tested virtues.... Unlike many of the Vietnam poems written at the time of the war or shortly thereafter—poems of anger or protest—Edward Micus's poems are composed, in every sense of that word. They delineate and measure their subjects; they do not advocate or hector; they do not sentimentalize. Many of them, like 'Ambush Moon' and 'So We Shot, ' will take their places among the very best war poems.... The Infirmary is a book that keeps deepening its concerns. For all its early charm, it pretties up nothing. Yet it's not without humor, and its prose interludes are written with the same care that the poems themselves exhibit."
—from the foreword by Stephen Dunn,
Judge of the 2008 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize

"Edward Micus won't write the kind of poem whose language leads only to charming confusions, whose music is machine-pressed, a tin ornament. His poems instead speak directly, and their quiet, searing imagery burns down the fence between visible and invisible world. That music you hear—it's the rhythm of affection, for places, lovers, friends. It's the rhythm of the blood 'taking in what it can, making its laps, / leading us on.'"
—Richard Robbins

I

JUST VISITING

We are the world that won’t let them weep.
—Richard Hugo

CROWS

Oil struck in Iowa,

your wet black skims these fields.

Dot on a fencepost i,

then eight upbeats to a scale on wind,

the check in a kid’s crayon

at two hundred feet.

Bow tie for a cornfield suit,

the groom on strung wire, any sky beside you

makes a lovely bride.

You’re the best news on the wire,

you stare down man’s worst weather,

you’re the pupil

in God’s one good eye.

NORTON

He’s a little slow. Parts of him never got

done. He came late to his own litter, barely made

the doggie God cut. One third lab, one third retriever,

one-third slow. His color can’t make up

its mind. Wherever it is black and brown meet

to say howdy, that place is Norton. One front leg goes

its own way but hardly knows where. A cowlick runs

the back of his neck, ridgeline fur that defies

hand or brush. It says, “It’s me. It’s Norton.”

Norton can camp out in his own skin.

He’d go out in a storm, never know to come in. You’d find

him frozen, a stiffened tail or an ear flapping

out of the drift, a kind of handle Norton would leave

you. Or he’d swim after ducks until he was spent, go down

for the last time, that Durwood Kirby look on his face.

He’s a little slow. But he’s got the part right,

he does the part fine. Friend, if your grin goes bad,

if love won’t keep you company, if your whole goddamn life

comes down on top of you, Norton’s fault it could

never, ever be.

YMCA

They made us swim naked at the YMCA. We were six or seven years old or so, dozens of us huddled along the ceramic shore, a cluster of behinds. The water was more green than blue and a haze gathered above us, a primordial mist that trapped itself beneath the ceiling canopy. They would teach us to swim, make us into little four-oared boats with peckers for rudders. But some sea in us already knew who we were and we took to water like lemmings, bumping again and again into each other, so many limbs flapping about in that little pool.

We tried to drown the weak. We squashed Leslie Morgan against the side of the pool until he hollered Uncle. We dragged Fats Logan to the murky depths and held him there, stuck rubber rings into his crack. We climbed on top of each other and fought two against two until the death or until our nuts were crushed against the necks of our partners. We crawled amphibious back to shore, slid along the slippery tile on our behinds, waving our arms and chanting the chant primeval. We stood in the warm shallows and smiled, little yellow clouds rising beside us.

“I don’t understand,” our mothers would say, “why they don’t make them wear suits.”

We knew things. We knew things our mothers might never know and those things made us stronger. Jimmie Geralk had a birthmark on his ass, the state of Louisiana. Justin Rail had no testicles as far as we could see. On the diving board Dutchie O’Dell’s pecker had a hook on the end. Tommie Anderson’s hid beneath a jacket of skin. And when we straddled the rope that strung the bobbing buoys between the deep and shallow ends, riding it cowboy, one hand waving the wetgreen air, a sensation crept through our groins, half pain and half pleasure, a kind of sex.

RE-RUNS

And the animals in question—four pink-eared, black-and-white laboratory rats—

appeared to be dreaming about something very specific: the maze they were learning to run.

Ah, the young Neapolitans, pink and pet furry,

tails up and they’re mobiles for a nursery.

When old Aunt Lizzie kept

her cold course, we veered left.

Traveling companions,

a million-year nap and we both awoke mammalian,

womby warm and breasty,

or dragging a sacful of testes.

How we scavenged, shared the same diet.

Blood and marrow, gristle and grain. Cheese or chocolate?

We can’t get enough of each other. We eat

and breathe and sleep together.

It’s the dream milk, cloudy with scene and circumstance.

Now day in review, the second chance.

Tomorrow the old routine, the mazes again.

Dry those red tears, old friends.

Sweet dreams, little sleepmates, and all the right turns—

tonight we’ll run the learning curve.

INDUSTRY, IOWA

Roll your windows up. When the Old Fort Road

bends south to pick up Vincent, take the dust west

until the wires quit. Look for a break in the corn.

That’s Industry.

Wear something worn. Tar never stole gravel

from these chickens. For a dime in ’17 a pig or boy

could ride the Northern to Fort Dodge. Bad times

don’t stretch pork or steel much. Now

it’s weather and Sundays come here.

Wind’s the oldest citizen, the elevator raises

pigeons, th...